Contact me
Email: bbranan at duraspace dot org
Role
Bill's primary role is as a developer and technical lead on the DuraCloud project where he has worked on the system architecture and core platform development, integrations with cloud storage and compute providers, design and development of the services infrastructure, and the creation of DuraCloud services, among other things. Bill is also a committer on the Fedora repository project.
Background
Bill came to DuraSpace from Fedora Commons, where he started in January 2008. His work on the Fedora repository project primarily focused on user interaction components such as the messaging infrastructure, REST API, and Web administrator. Prior to this, Bill worked at Harris Corporation on projects for the National Archives, the FAA, and the Government Printing Office, all of which had significant data storage and access requirements.
Fun Fact(s)
Bill lives and works in Florida where he enjoys the warm weather and sunshine. He has twin 3-year-old boys which keep him very busy whenever he's not developing software
This is the home page for the Bill Branan space. On this page you will find frequent updates regarding Bill Branan's activities.
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09/05/08
My main focus this week was getting an EC2 image set up which properly builds, installs, and starts a Fedora server on instance startup. Most of this work was server configuration and scripting. I started by recreating the image I made last week (which provides a checkout of trunk) with some updates. I used that as my base, then added scripting to grab and update the provided install.properties file, set up the environment, update the code, install Fedora, convert the demos using the current IP, and start the Fedora server. Adding that to the server startup provided the desired results. I can now start an instance with either a configA or configB properties file, then log in and run the system tests, which pass with no further setup.
I'm considering my initial pathfinding prototype complete at this stage since I believe the capabilities of EC2 have been well enough established. There are features that are lacking, such as the ability to choose a database other than the default and have that started and configured for you, and the ability to select the JVM version to use. Based on what I've done so far, though, these things can certainly be accomplished, it's just a matter of taking the time to do it. I'd like to use the architecture meeting on Tuesday to discuss where we plan to go with AWS.
I also spent some time investigating the Amazon EBS, just doing basic setup, mounting, moving from instance to instance, etc. There's not a lot to this, really, but it's something that we will very likely use in conjunction with EC2.